Negative Polarity
by Kuroeia
Summary: [Kuukaku, Yoruichi, Urahara] They were friends, once, but it's only fun and games until someone loses an arm... or falls in love.


**A/N: **Written for **emiweebee** for the July round of flashfics on LiveJournal.

I... really don't know. At first it was gen fic centered around Kuukaku and Yoruichi, then Urahara showed up and there were weird tensions and triangle-type things, and jealousy, and then somebody lost an arm and it all went to pot.

Enjoy:D

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_**Negative Polarity**_

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They were friends, once.

There was a time years and years ago when they had sat in the dirt on the leeside of random Rukongai buildings and drank themselves hysterical-- a dusty time, a narrow time, but a comfortably small and simple one.

xxxxx

Yoruichi knew that some time in her near future, there would be a world that required her service, a world of alarmingly sharp edges and sterile corners. She was born to a family that would not let her frolic in the rutted streets for long, a family that had long narrow closets full of ponderous silks and audience rooms with paths worn into the wooden floors. There were words for the life they assumed she would carry-- _duty_, and _honour,_ and _responsibility_. She didn't care for them, but it as it didn't actually matter if she cared or not, she would have to go anyway.

This was what the Shihouin family name meant to her-- constriction, and boredom.

Kuukaku's grief was different. It was not as selfish as Yoruichi's, but in some ways harsher: she had brothers.

She had a family that loved her, needed her, _depended_ on her, and she could not run from that without hating herself passionately enough to die of it. Kaien and Ganju needed her to be there and frighten the ghosts away when they came unsmiling. They were not weak, but they could only see what was in front of them, and were human enough still to be afraid.

It had taken her years, maybe even decades, to find them in the sprawling maze of sagging grey buildings and milling grey people that was Rukongai. She would not lose them now, even if it cost her freedom... even if it cost her happiness.

It was there that she and Yoruichi had met. Kuukaku, ruined with exhaustion and futile hope, had stumbled into her by chance on the street.

Yoruichi never told her what she was doing there. She may not even have known herself, but neither of them cared overmuch for reasons by that point. All that mattered was that at that moment, as the Shihouin princess looked down at the tear-streaked, filthy woman in the dirt before her, she felt _inferior _for a split second.

Here was a woman who had her priorities viciously straight, and would not bend on them.

Here was a woman who had the strength to continue past the point where the body was convinced that it must give up.

Here was a _woman_.

Yoruichi was envious, and intrigued, and so instead of stepping disdainfully past as her family had meticulously taught her, she held out her hand and helped Kuukaku up to her feet. Then she asked her out for a drink, and their odd angular friendship began.

Over the years, whenever Yoruichi felt too crumpled by the pressures of her responsibilities, or when Kuukaku felt chained by the burdens of caring for her family, they would meet in anonymy in a random district of Rukongai, trying a new bar every time. Liquor was expensive, so Yoruichi always paid, but neither of them felt that a debt was accumulated between them.

Kuukaku learned the ways of the fireworks, how to make things artfully explode in a violent display of colour and flame.

Yoruichi learned to kill soundlessly with no weapons but her bare hands and feet.

They both learned how to show something different on their faces than what they actually felt.

It amused them both to spend so much time together while being perfectly aware of the fact that in truth, they did not like each other overmuch. Kuukaku thought Yoruichi was an arrogant, spoiled bint, and Yoruichi thought Kuukaku to be somewhat uncultured and uncouth, to put it politely. They had little in common to talk about, but somehow there were never uncomfortable silences between them.

Comfortable ones, yes, but never the awkward ones that come between people who truly do not and cannot understand each other.

Different as they were, there was a streak of passion in them both that was familiar to them, that made it possible for them to be friends despite their mutual dislike.

And then came Urahara Kisuke.

He was a captain already, and wore the white coat with a careless flair that drew the eye and seduced the mind. It was like he walked in freedom no matter what responsibilities he had-- every step he took was of his own volition. Nobody was forcing him to do anything, though he carried so much.

It was magnetic to both of them, who felt so burdened by their lives. It was not a sexual attraction, exactly, but there was a fascination with the taste of liberty that trailed from his heels which neither of them tried very hard to resist.

They went for lunch together, the three of them, and spoke of their three worlds that hardly intersected at all, and somehow were not uncomfortable with each other.

Kuukaku fell a little bit in love with him. Yoruichi fell a lot.

Neither of them said a word to him, but he was deeply observant and most certainly knew anyway. He did nothing to encourage either of them, only regaled them with tales of his moronic subordinates and fearsome Hollows and socially inept comrades (these mostly about Komamura, Urahara seemed to find every thing out of the other captain's mouth hysterical on the deepest level) that had them leaning on each other in fits of teary laughter.

They did not chase him, and he did not ask them to.

For years, their odd tangle was a great comfort to each of them. Any one of them could call the trio together if they'd had a particularly awful day or week, and sometimes they met without any reason but the impulse to be with people who would not ask questions they did not want to answer.

Then one day, in a way that felt inevitable, they drank a little too much sake and got a little too far from the usual borders of conduct. Kuukaku, in a moment of abandon, seized Kisuke by the front of his robes and kissed him passionately, drunkenly.

Yoruichi, though not an unreasonable woman when sober, was not so wise when intoxicated, and became terribly angry.

The bar fight that ensued became legend in the seventy-eighth district of Rukongai and in three districts outwards in each direction. They were strong, both of them, and Urahara's drunken attempts to calm them down caused possibly more damage than either woman caused on their own.

They left in tattered bits of their former glories, furious and distracted.

That night, Kuukaku's lack of focus lost her an arm when she tried to speak to the fireworks without paying real attention to their voices.

Yoruichi, when she woke up the next morning, discovered that she had lost her pride. The memory of the way she'd acted that night would haunt her throughout the next years. She'd been childish. No more.

Urahara lost some of his aloofness after discovering what effect ambiguity could have on others around him.

They never went drinking together again.

xxxxxxx

Oh yes, they had once been friends.

Sometimes they looked back and laughed at what a silly thing had broken them apart, but neither of them ever tried to reconcile it.

When Urahara left, Yoruichi followed him, and Kuukaku wished them well to their backs. She would stay there, on the outskirts, in her strange castles with her dense but good-hearted brothers, and would relearn her craft with one arm.

It was a strange friendship anyway. Losing it did not hurt too badly, they told themselves.

Still, the next time they saw each other, Yoruichi with an oddball group of ryoka in tow, neither of them could resist smiling until their faces hurt. Ferocious smiles, unsettling ones, but real and honest ones.

In a way, they'd missed each other.

xxxxxxx

They were friends... once.

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**A/N: **I can't decide whether I hate this fic or find it uproariously funny. Maybe both. In any case, I hope you enjoyed it. XD

-Eia


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